News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #17
The trade-offs and challenges that are part of the clean energy transition and more stories I've been reading this week.
Reasonable people can, I think, disagree on whether they want renewable energy facilities or installations near their homes, as long as they are dealing in facts and not specious claims. As a Lifelong City Dweller™, this is mostly an abstract issue for me, and not a directly personal one. But I think this is yet another area where creating a clean and just future requires being upfront about the tradeoffs that may have to be made, which ones we’re okay with and which ones we are not.
So that’s what today’s stories will deal with.
I was thinking about this because a. there was some important news on this subject this week, and b. after last week’s installment, a longtime reader/longtime emailer wrote to say that s/he had been transformed into a wind farm NIMBYer after reading this story in Buzzfeed from 2021 about the unpleasantness faced by some people after a wind farm went up near their home. People spoke of headaches from the low hum, sick or dead farm animals, and other complaints.
These were not the arguments I’d previously heard against wind turbines from reputable sources, though I’m sure the people involved experienced symptoms. Usually, what you hear against wind turbines are that they get in the way of views, or take over land that is sacred or provides habitat to endangered or threatened species, or destroys public land or nature for the sake of the energy demands of people who live far away. (These same objections hold true for large solar installations.) So I kept reading the story, which went on to say this (rather far down…): (emphasis mine)
The largest and most thorough epidemiological study of wind turbine noise was published by Health Canada in 2014. Notably, it is the only study of turbines that has ever supplemented self-reports of negative health effects with objective health measures, including blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol in hair samples. In more than 1,000 households at varying distances from wind farms, Health Canada found no link between exposure to turbine noise and illness, chronic disease, stress, or sleep quality.
Crucially, though, it showed a correlation between increasing wind turbine noise and reports of annoyance. A 2011 paper in the journal Environmental Health suggested that “self reported health effects of people living near wind turbines are more likely attributed to physical manifestation from an annoyed state.”Another way of putting this is that something like wind turbine syndrome is real — it’s just not caused by hearing wind turbines. Rather, some scientists have suggested, it’s caused by hearing about how bad wind turbines are, producing what they call the “nocebo effect.”
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